Tainted Trail (25 page)

Max pinched the bridge of his nose. “Kid, please don't take this the wrong way, but your people don't make sense, evolutionwise. Why have genetic memory passed on to your children, only to have them outgrow it?”

“Ontongard don't have children,” Ukiah said. “They reproduce by infecting other creatures. A handful of cells are injected into a host to profligate throughout the body.”

“Well, this whole old-memory/new-memory thing—”

“—isn't normal in Ontongard. Rennie theorizes that it's part of what allows the Pack be individuals. We can tell where we as an individual end and someone else starts.”

“Prime passed this mutation on to both you and the Pack?”

“Luckily.”

“So, if you're not Magic Boy, where is he?”

Ukiah recalled the photos of the scattered limbs. He swallowed hard. “He might not exist anymore. There may be just parts of him, like me, left.”

Max stared at him for several minutes. “Ukiah, this is fairly empty country. Someone's bound to notice four or five identical Wolf Boys running around.
You
would have noticed them. You've never said anything about remembering someone like you. Was there?”

Ukiah consulted his earliest memories. “No, there wasn't.”

Max tapped the book's spine into his palm. “I would assume that any Native Americans picked up as a John Doe would have been taken to the reservation. No one has remarked on the similarities between you and someone else in the tribe. Maybe the rest stayed animals. There could be dozens of mice and such flitting around someplace.”

With just one mouse, Ukiah could recapture his childhood. “I wonder where the murder site was.”

Max lifted the book. “It's probably in here. I'm going to copy this.”

Ukiah pondered if he wanted to look for the murder site and chance finding lost bits of Magic Boy. While Rennie's memories remained clearly delineated from his own, the memories he recovered from Joe Gary's cabin—lost for three years—merged seamlessly. What if he couldn't tell where Magic Boy ended and he began? Which one of him would emerge dominant? The private investigator who lived among the whites, or the Native American who had good cause to hate them?

Perhaps it would be best to stay ignorant.

Ukiah joined Sam in checking through the microfilm boxes.

She glanced up as he entered the room. “Where did Max go?”

“I found a book he wanted to copy.”

Sam chewed on her lower lip before saying, “I'm sorry about this whole ‘we're dating' mess.”

“You didn't do anything.”

She relaxed slightly. “That's sweet of you to say so.”

After they checked all the boxes, including opening them and verifying the beginning dates, they checked with Millie. She came and quickly checked over the boxes herself.

“They
were
here!” Millie threw up her hands. “That girl was in looking at them.”

“Alicia Kraynak?” Sam asked.

“Yes, her. She was in here, bawling her eyes out. I came over to make sure she was okay, and that's what she had up. September, 1933.”

“When was this?” Ukiah asked.

“The Saturday before last. The twenty-first?” Millie went off to call some of the other staff to see if they knew the whereabouts of the missing film.

“So they were here, and now they're gone,” Sam said.

“Alicia's kidnappers must have taken them,” Ukiah said.

“Or Alicia herself.”

“Alicia isn't that type of person,” Ukiah said. “She forgot to pay for a pack of gum once, and we had to drive back ten miles to the store to pay the fifty cents.”

“Forgot to pay?”

“She forgot she had them in her hand. She was—is really absentminded.” And suddenly it was so awful that a few days short of vanishing, she had sat and cried for him. The nearly indestructible one.

 

They had a dispirited lunch at Taco Bell down the street from the library. True to his word, Rennie kept out of sight, but Ukiah still sensed him, roving on the edge of his awareness. It was a comforting feeling after viewing Magic Boy's murder.

Sam and Max talked over the logistics of comparing the arson suspects with the list of people Alicia had come in contact with. During their investigation, Sam had noted everyone the team had interviewed into a slim tablet with a brief description of their interaction with Alicia. Back at her offices, however, were the case files for the house fires. Those included employment records of the dead, insurance and arson reports, any arrest records of survivors, background checks of beneficiaries and area newcomers, and in some cases, even family trees. The result was measured in the square feet of paper. Sam's office, she said, would hold only two people with very little space to spread out paperwork. Neither Max nor Sam wanted to work in a public place such as the library or the hotel room. Reluctantly, Sam suggested that they retreat to her house to filter through the lists.

Arranging to meet at the park behind the library, Sam went off to gather her files from her office.

Max and Ukiah hit a supermarket for supplies, filled the Blazer's gas tank, and drifted back to the park. Ukiah
sprawled on the shaded grass, trying not to think of the grisly photos, while Max made a series of phone calls, trying to keep their business back in Pittsburgh from unraveling.

Both of their part-time investigators, Chino and Janey, were good at stakeouts and trailing suspects without being noticed, which made them good for surveillance. They could hold their own in a brawl, which made them wonderful company while looking for skips or serving papers.

Investigative legwork, much like Max, Sam, and Ukiah had been doing daily in Pendleton, however, eluded the two. It seemed as if they couldn't conceive the next step to take once they reached the end of each task. Max needed to chop each case up into segments, talking them through each procedure.

“I know it's not because I'm a bad teacher,” Max growled as he hung up. “I taught you fine. You understand how to follow leads and ask the right questions. They just don't get it.”

“Why can't I find Alicia, then?”

“Working a case and solving it are two different things, the second sometimes having little to do with skill and much to do with luck.”

They fell silent, and the wind moved through the trees, throwing dappled shadows on them.

“Alicia was doing a great job of finding my family,” Ukiah noted. “She couldn't have known how close she was when she found that photo at the Tamástslikt, or even the book. The obituary would have listed Jesse Kicking Deer, and if she talked to him about me—” He fell silent, realizing where that thread would lead.

“It keeps going back to the Kicking Deers,” Max murmured.

“No,” Ukiah snapped. “They had nothing to do with Alicia's kidnapping.”

Max spread his hands wide. “A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for most people. Maybe we should look into who gets the money if Jesse doesn't hand it out as a reward.”

Ukiah leaped to his feet, unable to deal with his anger at Max. It was a foreign emotion, and he flailed about, trying to find a way to get rid of it. “It couldn't have been one of them.
Jared was with us when I was shot, and when the kidnappers went to Bear Wallow Creek to get Alicia's stuff. And it wasn't Zoey, or Cassidy, or Jesse, either!”

“I'm just saying that every time we turn around, there's something to do with the Kicking Deers.”

“It's just because Alicia was trying to find my family.” Ukiah flung out reasons. “And I'm trying to find them, and Jared's the sheriff. The man in the woods was blond and blue-eyed.”

“Elaine Kicking Deer is blond and blue-eyed. Maybe the kidnapper is a distant cousin who has very little Indian blood.”

Ukiah searched through his memory, finding the places where he made skin-to-skin contact with the various Kicking Deers. Zoey kissing Ukiah's cheek. Jared rubbing his thumb along Ukiah's newly healed radius bone. Cassidy brushing Ukiah's hair from his eyes. The siblings were too close to give a broad Kicking Deer “pattern.”

He called up his visit to the hardware store, with the various Kicking Deer men. Had he touched any of them?

A stray memory leaped out from the flow.

Sam sighed at the news and tossed one of the candies to Ukiah. “One of the deputies, Matt Brody, lost his kid in June. He's one of my drowning victims.”

“Oh.”

“He and his wife took it hard . . .”

Ukiah stilled, as it triggered another memory, from later that night, as Max was cutting off his cast.

“. . . One of Kicking Deer's deputies, he's one of those big dumb-blond ox types, has a theory that a hunter shot you, despite the fact it's out of season for just about everything.”

“What is it?” Max asked, recognizing that Ukiah had thought of something.

“Jared's deputy.” Ukiah whispered.

“Which one?”

“The big blond with the hunting-accident theory, the police scanner, the wife, and the drowned boy.”

“Wife?”

“The female kidnapper.”

“Oh, shit.” Max's eyes scanned back through the days. “You haven't met him to do a DNA match on the kidnapper's hair.”

“What's he like?”

“He's way beyond poker-faced. Wooden.” Max took out a cheroot, moved downwind, and lit it. “He set off my creep alarms, but then they told me about his son, and I put it down to grief. I thought I knew something of what Brody was going through.”

Max's wife had vanished without a trace. Months later, Max learned that she had gone out antique hunting and spun her Porsche off the road and into a lake. No one had seen the accident, and she had been so far from her normal area that no one thought to look for her in the lake.

“After something like that,” Max said quietly, “you walk around with all your feelings shut down, because it hurts too much to feel.”

“Except Brody's out kidnapping Alicia and shooting me.”

Fury gathered in Max's face, and his eyes went cold. “Damn the bastard. He'll pay for this.”

“I'm just guessing at this, Max. Until I compare his DNA with the hair I found, we can't know for sure.”

“And then it will be your word against his. We'll need something more concrete than a stray hair before we can point fingers.”

If Brody were Alicia's kidnapper, he had stayed one step ahead of them, carefully removing evidence. What had he done with Alicia? Today would mark a full week since her kidnapping. Ukiah tried to believe she was still alive, but all the deaths that Sam was investigating loomed up, condemning any hope Ukiah had for Alicia.

He peered at Max through his dark bangs. “You think Brody might have killed his own son?”

Max recognized Ukiah's fears for Alicia. He reached out to the boy and gripped his shoulder. “I'm sorry, Ukiah, but yes. There's been something about the man that raised my hackles from the start, so to speak.”

Ukiah flopped back onto the grass to watch sunlight diamond through the shifting leaves. Obviously, Brody had the
locals fooled. Max and he would have to play within the rules and find something that would nail Brody without obtaining it illegally. Ukiah cast his thoughts back over the last week, and found the hole in their investigation.

“We never found the sniper site of my shooting. Brody wouldn't have had a lot of time to set up, and he might have left in a hurry, to establish an alibi in another location. He might have left evidence.”

“Good boy!” Max clapped him on the shoulder. “See. I'm a great teacher!”

 

“Change of plans,” Max announced when Sam returned. “We're going south, one car, so we can talk.”

Sam frowned at Max as she reluctantly got out of her car. “South?” She glanced to Ukiah, and read something on his face that Max managed to hide. “You've got a new lead.”

“Possibly,” Max said. “Bring your files.”

Ukiah reached out to Rennie, who drifted on the edge of his senses.
“Rennie? We're going down to where I was shot.”

Rennie's faint reply grew stronger as the Pack leader moved to intercept them.
“I hear you. I'll tag along behind and make sure you're not followed.”

Sam shifted her case files across to the Blazer and they headed out of Pendleton for the national park. “What's up?”

Ukiah leaned over the front seat between Max and Sam. “Tell us everything you know about Deputy Brody.”

“Matt Brody?” She glanced to Max and saw that they were serious. “Brody is a good cop. Yeah, he's gotten weird since his son died, but Harry's the second kid the Brodys have lost, and they can't have any more.”

“The second one?” Ukiah asked.

“The whole family was in a car accident four years ago; a drunk driver hit them. Matt Brody lost one of his kidneys. Vivian Brody took massive trauma to her intestinal tract; they thought she was going to die. Their little girl—the car seat failed, and she went through the windshield.”